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ON  THE  RIGHT  USE 


BOOKS 


. P.  ATKINSON 


GIFT   OF 

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ON 


THE  RIGHT  USE  OF  BOOKS 


A     LECTURE. 


BY  WILLIAM   P.  ATKINSON, 

PROFESSOR   OF   ENGLISH   AND   HISTORY   IN   THE    MASSACHUSETTS 
INSTITUTE    OF    TECHNOLOGY. 


BOSTON: 
ROBERTS   BROTHERS. 

1878. 


IfBfUJCf 
SCHOOL 


Copyright,   1878, 
BY  W.  P.  ATKINSON. 


The  following  Lecture  was  written  for ',  and  first  read  to, 
a  class  of  young  business  men,  at  that  admirable  institution, 
the  Boston  Voting  Men's  Christian  Union.  Many  additions 
have  since  been  made  to  //,  and  some  parts  have  been  altered. 
For  the  opinions  it  contains  nc  one  is  responsible  but  the 
author. 


Cambridge  : 
Press  of  John   Wilson  &*  Son. 


THE   RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 


THAT  excellent  writer,  the  Rector  of  Lincoln 
College,  Oxford,  discoursing  the  other  day  on  Books 
and  Critics,*  quotes  Mrs.  Browning  as  saying: 
"  The  ne  plus  ultra  of  intellectual  indolence  is  the 
reading  of  books.  It  comes  next  to  what  the 
Americans  call  whittling."  Nothing  can  be  more 
diametrically  opposed  to  popular  belief ;  for 
that  belief  is  that  there  is  something  meritorious 
in  the  very  act  of  reading.  It  does  not  matter 
much  what  we  read  —  barring  immoral  reading  — 
provided  we  only  read.  Parents  love  to  see  their 
children  reading,  —  it  keeps  them  out  of  mischief, 
they  say,  —  and  take  little  heed  of  the  quality  or 
direction  of  their  reading ;  as  if,  the  main  point 
once  gained,  these  were  of  quite  inferior  impor- 
tance. Is  it  not  all  contained  in  books  ?  There  is 
a  sorj:  of  sacredness  attached,  in  their  minds,  to  the 
printed  page  ;  as  if,  the  imprimatur  once  received, 

*  Fortnightly  Review,  Nov.,  1877. 

411415 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 


thought  took  on  quite  a  different  character  from 
what  it  had  before. 

Nevertheless,  I  am  much  of  the  mind  of  Mrs. 
Browning.  I  do  not  believe  that  the  world  is  much, 
if  any,  the  wiser  for  a  good  deal  of  the  reading  that 
goes  on  in  it ;  and  perhaps  I  cannot  better  begin 
what  I  have  to  say  on  the  subject  than  by  trying  to 
ascertain  why  this  is  true. 

Perhaps  I  may  say  that  the  answer  is  an  obvious 
one.  We  do  not  profit  by  our  reading  because  we 
do  not  know  how  to  read,  and  we  do  not  know  how 
because  we  have  never  been  taught.  To  be  sure, 
it  is  a  ,very  difficult  art ;  and  in  one  sense,  and  that 
the  deepest,  we  may  say  that  it  cannot  be  taught. 
Goethe  is  reported  to  have  said  :  "  I  have  been  fifty 
years  trying  to  learn  how  to  read,  and  I  have  not 
learned  yet."  The  art  which  Goethe  had  not 
learned  in  fifty  years,  we  need  not  feel  ashamed 
not  to  be  perfect  in  ;  and  yet  the  question  may  well 
arise,  Why,  with  all  the  reading  that  goes  on,  is  so 
much  well-meant  effort  absolutely  thrown  away  ? 
I  am  a  teacher  in  a  school  of  science,  but  my  own 
teaching  lies  not  among  scientific,  but  among 
non-scientific  subjects,  —  though  I  cannot  use  the 
current  phraseology  without  a  protest,  —  and  I  am 
in  the  habit  of  prefacing  my  instruction  in  history 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 


and  literature  to  the  successive  classes  of  young 
men  who  come  to  me  by  a  request  that  they  would 
give  me  an  account  of  their  previous  English 
studies  and  English  reading ;  and  I  remember  the 
contrast  which,  not  long  ago,  two  of  their  answers 
afforded.  One  wrote  me  a  list  of  English  authors, 
beginning  with  Chaucer  and  ending  with  Haw- 
thorne whom  he  had  "  gone  through,"  as  the  phrase 
is,  at  school,  and  wound  up  with  the  naive  remark 
that  there  was  only  one  study  that  he  hated  more 
than  he  hated  English  Literature,  and  that  was 
the  other  study  with  which  I  was  about  to  engage 
his  attention  ;  namely,  Rhetoric  and  Composition. 
And  herein  I  suppose  he  was  only  honestly  and 
frankly  expressing  the  state  of  mind  of  the  average 
school-boy,  which  is  the  result  of  the  ordinary 
school  teaching  of  these  subjects.  A  state  of 
chronic  disgust  at  good  literature  which  drives 
him  to  "dime  novels"  for  recreation,  combined  with 
a  chronic  incapacity  to  pen  an  ordinary  letter  cor- 
rectly, is,  I  fear,  too  often  the  upshot  of  the  literary 
training  of  our  schools.  The  other  told  me  that 
he  was  the  son  of  a  country  physician  ;  that  he  had 
not  had  much  schooling,  but  that  his  father  had  a 
small  general  library,  and  that  he  had  done  much 
reading  in  his  father's  books  up  in  the  retirement 


3  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

of  his  father's  hay-mow  ;  and  the  hay-mow  had  so 
far  proved  the  better  school  that  no  disgust  was  in- 
dicated for  Rhetoric  or  Literature.  What  the 
school,  with  its  elaborately  misdirected  effort,  had 
failed  to  do  for  the  one,  the  other  had  done  for  him- 
self:  he  had  learned  in  part  the  Art  of  Reading. 

I  do  not  wish  to  draw  any  argument  from  these 
examples  in  favor  of  what  is  called  self-education, 
or  to  underrate  the  value  of  school  training,  even 
with  all  its  present  imperfections  and  absurdities. 
At  school,  the  child's  mind  is  drilled,  however  badly  ; 
trained,  in  company  with  others,  to  take  the  first 
steps  on  that  broad  highway  which  all  generations 
must  follow  ;  put  in  possession,  however  imper- 
fectly, not  so  much  of  knowledge,  as  of  those  tools 
of  knowledge  which  are  indispensable,  if  higher 
real  knowledge  is  to  be  acquired  afterwards.  I 
would  be  the  last  to  overlook  the  importance,  in 
early  school  training,  of  those  semi-mechanical  ele- 
ments of  drill,  discipline,  and  mental  gymnastic, 
on  which  the  value  of  the  mind  as  an  instrument 
for  future  acquisition  so  much  depends.  But  why  — 
the  question  comes  —  does  this  school  training,  so 
elaborately  applied,  so  often  prove  fruitless  ?  Why 
does  this  school  knowledge,  so  painfully  acquired, 
lie  like  dead  lumber  in  the  mind,  even  if  it  enter 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 


the  mind  at  all  ?  Why  does  it  not  take  root,  and 
quicken  into  life,  and  grow  ?  The  answer  can  only 
be  that  pedants  have  exalted  the  means  into  an  end  ; 
in  perfecting  the  machinery,  have  lost  sight  of  the 
object  the  machinery  should  accomplish  ;  and  thus, 
while  our  children  are  overtaught  and  overdrilled, 
they  are  not  educated  ;  and  the  defects  of  our  edu- 
cational system  are  nowhere  so  patent  as  in  its 
failure  to  impart  a  real  taste  for  books,  to  commu- 
nicate the  true  Art  of  Reading. 

You  have  invited  me,  whose  calling  keeps  me 
among  books,  to  say  a  word  to  you  about  the  right 
use  of  them.  And  because  my  calling  has  kept 
me  among  books,  and  I  can  thus  bring  personal 
experience  to  bear  upon  the  subject,  I  hope  I  may 
be  able  to  say  a  helpful  word  or  two.  But,  though 
I  speak  of  an  Art  of  Reading,  do  not  suppose  I  mean 
to  lay  down  any  body  of  rules  for  your  guidance. 
I  have  no  such  rules.  In  study  as  in  life,  each  of 
us  must  find  his  own  way,  though  there  are  none  of 
us  so  wise  that  we  cannot  be  helped  by  the  experi- 
ence of  our  neighbors.  It  is  some  of  the  results  of 
that  experience  that  I  purpose  giving  you ;  and  if 
some  of  my  remarks  seem  trite,  and  quite  wanting 
in  the  charm  of  novelty,  I  can  only  plead  that  the 
most  important  subjects  are  the  most  hackneyed, 


10  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

and  that  one  of  the  results  of  my  experience  has 
been  to  find  that  the  older  I  grow  the  more  highly 
I  value  many  truths  which,  for  the  very  reason  that 
they  are  trite  and  obvious,  are  most  certain  of 
being  neglected. 

I  shall  therefore  begin  with  this  remark,  that  for 
success  in  reading  and  study,  though  it  is  well 
enough  to  have  a  good  head,  it  is  far  more  impor- 
tant to  have  a  good  digestion.  I  do  not  think  it 
makes  us  unhappy  to  know  that  we  have  not  all 
the  wits  of  our  eminent  intellectual  neighbors. 
What  does  make  us  unhappy  is  not  to  be  able  to 
use  all  the  little  wits  that  we  possess  ;  and  we 
never  can  do  that,  unless  we  have  a  good  stomach. 
Now,  to  the  end  of  having  a  good  stomach,  in  order 
that  we  may  be  in  possession  of  all  our  wits,  we 
must  be  abstemious  in  our  —  reading.  Nothing  so 
certainly  deranges  the  digestion  as  cramming  the 
brain.  This  is  one  of  those  trite  remarks  which  I 
wish  above  all  things  to  impress  upon  you.  If  it 
were  really  impressed  upon  the  mind  of  the  com- 
munity, it  would  revolutionize  our  education.  That 
the  very  first  and  most  indispensable  of  all  the 
qualifications  that  go  to  make  a  successful  student 
is  a  sound  physical  constitution,  is  the  great  truth 
which  all  modern  physiology  preaches,  and,  none  the 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  1 1 

less,  which  almost  all  modern  practice  still  ignores. 
And  it  seems  in  vain  that  modern  physiology  tells 
us  why,  —  that  it  is  only  thus  that  fresh  and 
healthy  blood  can  flow,  to  set  in  healthy  activity 
that  wonderful  little  instrument,  delicate  as  wonder- 
ful, by  means  of  which  alone,  while  we  are  on  this 
little  ball  of  earth,  we  think.  We  must  have  an  in- 
tellectual existence  of  some  kind.  To  live  —  what 
is  it  but  to  think  and  feel  ?  And,  willingly  or  un- 
willingly, that  existence  is  carried  on  here  through 
the  medium  of  that  material  instrument,  the  brain. 
And  it  is  by  the  indirect  control  we  possess  over 
that,  that  we  are  enabled  largely  to  determine  what 
sort  of  an  intellectual  and  emotional  life  we  shall 
lead  upon  the  earth,  —  whether  it  shall  take  us  over 
clear  and  sunny  mountain-tops,  or  through  the  very 
valley  of  the  shadow  of  death. 

This  is  all  getting  trite  and  commonplace  enough ; 
and  yet  is  it  not  what  we  still  ignore  in  all  our  prac- 
tice ?  The  popular  idea  of  a  young  scholar  is  that 
he  should  be  a  pale  and  spectacled  young  man,  very 
thin,  and  with  a  slight  and  interesting  tendency 
to  sentimentality  and  consumption.  Parents  send 
their  weakly  children  to  college ;  and  it  is  supposed 
to  be  an  ordinance  of  nature  that  a  large  proportion 
of  what  are  called  promising  young  persons  should 


12  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

die  young.  Well,  they  are  promising  young  persons 
in  the  sense  of  never  performing  any  thing ;  but, 
instead  of  killing  them  with  a  college,  it  would  be 
vastly  better  to  turn  them  out  to  grass  till  they  got 
strong  enough  to  exchange  promise  for  perform- 
ance ;  at  least,  till  such  time  as  we  can  get  colleges 
organized  that  will  not  kill  them.  While  they  con- 
tinue in  that  so-called  promising  condition,  depend 
upon  it,  they  are  not  stuff  to  make  successful  schol- 
ars of.  You  might  as  well  take  all  the  weakly 
trees  to  make  an  orchard,  or  all  the  lean  and  stunted 
cattle  to  make  a  herd.  "How  can  you,"  said  I 
once  to  the  most  laborious  student  I  ever  knew,  — 
"  how  can  you  do  such  an  enormous  amount  of  study 
and  mental  labor  ?  "  "  Because,"  was  the  answer, 
"  I  laid  up  so  many  rods  of  stone  wall  on  my 
father's  farm  when  I  was  a  boy." 

It  is  plain,  then,  that  the  most  important  question 
for  the  good  student  and  reader  is  not,  amidst  this 
multitude  of  books  which  no  man  can  number,  how 
much  he  shall  read.  The  really  important  questions 
are,  first,  what  is  the  quality  of  what  he  does  read  ; 
and,  second,  what  is  his  manner  of  reading  it. 
There  is  an  analogy  which  is  more  than  accidental 
between  physical  and  mental  assimilation  and  diges- 
tion ;  and,  homely  as  the  illustration  may  seem,  it  is 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  13 

the  most  forcible  I  can  use.  Let  two  sit  down  to  a 
table  spread  with  food :  one  possessed  of  a  healthy 
appetite,  and  knowing  something  of  the  nutritious 
qualities  of  the  various  dishes  before  him;  the 
other  cursed  with  a  pampered  and  capricious  appe- 
tite, and  knowing  nothing  of  the  results  of  chemical 
and  physiological  investigation.  One  shall  make 
a  better  meal,  and  go  away  stronger  and  better  fed, 
on  a  dish  of  oatmeal,  than  the  other  on  a  dinner 
that  has  half  emptied  his  pocket.  Shall  we  study 
physiological  chemistry  and  know  all  about  what 
is  food  for  the  body,  and  neglect  mental  chemistry, 
and  be  utterly  careless  as  to  what  nutriment  is 
contained  in  the  food  we  give  our  minds  ?  I  am 
not  speaking  here  of  vicious  literature  :  we  don't 
spread  our  dinner-tables  with  poisons.  I  speak 
only  of  the  varying  amount  of  nutritive  matter 
contained  in  books.  Only  think  of  the  range  — 
what  we  may  call  the  nutritive  range  — which  lies 
between  Shakspeare  and  Mr.  Tupper !  And  yet 
"  Proverbial  Philosophy "  weighs  as  much  avoir- 
dupois, and  looks  as  fair  on  the  library  shelves,  as 
the  greatest  of  poets. 

We  have  been  building  a  monument  lately  in 
Boston,  but  I  think  the  grandest  and  noblest  monu- 
ment our  good  old  city  ever  reared  is  that  Public 


14  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

Library  of  hers,  open,  without  money  and  without 
price,  to  rich  and  poor  alike  ;  albeit,  its  architecture 
does  leave  something  to  desire.  But  I  saw  the 
other  day,  in  a  newspaper,  lamentable  statistics  of 
the  use  it  is  put  to  by  the  rising  generation.  There 
is  a  storehouse  of  the  richest  and  best  intellect- 
ual food,  but  mingled  with  great  heaps  of  husks 
and  not  a  little  poison,  and  they  have  never  been 
taught  how  to  pick  out  the  grain  from  the  chaff, 
not  even  how  to  avoid  the  poison.  I  do  not  think 
they  find  much  there  that  is  positively  vicious,  but 
there  seems  to  be  an  absolutely  unlimited  demand 
for  twaddle.  Does  not  this  prove  what  I  set  out 
with  saying,  that  our  schools  do  not  teach  the  Art 
of  Reading?  At  the  only  schools  the  great  ma- 
jority of  the  boys  and  girls  attend,  they  have  been 
set  down  to  a  Barmecide  feast  of  empty  cups  and 
platters.  The  alphabet,  cyphering,  grammar,  writ- 
ing, are  not  knowledge :  they  are  only  the  tools  of 
knowledge,  —  indispensable  tools,  indeed,  —  skill 
in  the  use  of  which  it  is  the  business,  but  not  the 
only  nor  the  highest  business,  of  these  schools  to  im- 
part. But  the  poor  boys  and  girls  are  kept,  year  in 
and  year  out,  wielding  knife  and  fork  of  grammar 
and  spelling  and  cyphering  over  dishes  empty  of 
all  real  mental  nutriment,  diligently  dipping  spoons 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  IS 

into  bowls  where  the  intellectual  draught  that 
should  have  slaked  their  thirst  has  been  forgotten.* 
Then  we  turn  these  babies  in  intellect  loose  in  a 
public  library,  and  expect  them  to  find  their  way ! 
What  wonder  that,  to  supply  the  demands  of  such 
readers,  twaddle-mills,  if  I  may  be  allowed  such 
an  expression,  are  set  up,  and  cannot  grind  their 
grist  of  intellectual  chaff  fast  enough  to  supply 
the  market.  After  all,  age  has  its  advantages. 
I  thank  my  stars  that  I  was  born  in  those  prehis- 
toric times  when  boys  read  Scott's  novels,  and  be- 
fore the  advent  of  the  Oliver  Optics  and  the  Mrs. 
Southworths,  who  are  doing  so  much  to  weaken 
the  mental  fibre  of  thjs  generation. 

Just  as  the  Public  Library  is  the  needful  supple- 
ment to  the  Public  School,  —  and  Boston  will  some 
day  be  honored  for  having  been  the  first  to  give  the 
truth  a  practical  recognition,  —  and  a  good  collec- 
tion of  books  has  been  well  called  the  college  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  so  it  will  never  be  rightly 
made  use  of  till  our  schools  give  a  really  efficient 
preparation  for  it  by  teaching  the  Art  of  Reading. 

*  A  long  step  will  have  been  taken  towards  remedying  this 
state  of  things  when  the  admirable  "  Suggestions  accompanying 
the  Course  of  Study  for  Grammar  and  Primary  Schools,'*  recently 
issued  by  the  Boston  Board  of  School  Supervisors,  shall  be 
universally  carried  out  in  the  spirit  in  which  they  have  been 
drawn  up. 


1 6  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

And  at  the  foundation  of  this  art  of  reading 
there  lie  certain  distinctions,  which,  if  we  learn  to 
make  them,  will  guide  us  in  our  choice  of  books. 
Let  me  quote  one  of  these  distinctions  from  De 
Quincey,  —  that,  namely,  between  what  he  calls  the 
Literature  of  Knowledge  and  the  Literature  of 
Power.  You  will  find  it  in  his  Essay  on  Pope. 

"There  is  the  literature  of  knowledge"  he 'says, 
"  and  there  is  the  literature  of  power.  The  func- 
tion of  the  first  is  to  teach;  the  function  of  the 
second  is  to  move.  The  first  is  a  rudder;  the 
second,  an  oar  or  a  sail.  The  first  speaks  to  the 
mere  discursive  understanding ;  the  second  speaks, 
ultimately  it  may  happen,  to  the  higher  understand- 
ing or  reason,  but  always  through  affections  of 
pleasure  and  sympathy."  And  he  illustrates  his 
distinction  thus  :  "  What  do  you  learn  from  '  Para- 
dise Lost '  ?  Nothing  at  all.  What  do  you  learn 
from  a  cookery-book  ?  Something  new,  something 
that  you  did  not  know  before,  in  every  paragraph. 
But  would  you  therefore  put  the  wretched  cookery- 
book  on  a  higher  level  of  estimation  than  the  divine 
poem  ?  What  you  owe  to  Milton  is  not  any  knowl- 
edge, of  which  a  million  separate  items  are  still  but 
a  million  of  advancing  steps  on  the  same  earthly 
level :  what  you  owe  is  power,  that  is,  exercise  and 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  I/ 

expansion  to  your  own  latent  capacity  of  sympathy 
with  the  infinite,  where  every  pulse  and  each  sepa- 
rate influx  is  a  step  upwards.  .  .  .  All  the  steps  of 
knowledge,  from  first  to  last,  carry  you  further  on 
the  same  plane,  but  could  never  raise  you  one  foot 
above  your  ancient  level  of  earth  ;  whereas  the  very 
first  step  in  power  is  a  flight, —  is  an  ascending 
into  another  element/' 

Such,  slightly  abbreviated,  is  Mr.  De  Quincey's 
fine  distinction.  Now  I  think  the  books  we  are 
most  concerned  with  here  are  those  belonging,  not 
to  the  literature  of  knowledge,  but  those  belonging 
to  the  literature  of  power,  and  first  and  foremost 
the  books  of  the  poets.  Is  it  not  worth  our  while 
to  study  Poetry  ?  "  Study  poetry ! "  I  hear  some 
sentimental  young  lady  or  gentleman  say.  "  What 
occasion  is  there  for  study  ?  why,  it 's  my  delight. 
Stars  and  flowers  and  the  moon  and  hearts  and 
darts  and  every  thing  lovely,  —  all  those  dear,  de- 
lightful volumes  in  blue  and  gold,  I  have  them 
about  me  all  the  time."  Yes,  about  you,  my  dear 
sentimental  young  lady  or  young  gentleman,  on  the 
centre-table,  and  in  elegant  rows  on  the  book- 
shelves, —  about  you,  but  not  in  you. 

I  once  met  with  a  lecture  —  and  a  very  good 
lecture  it  was  —  by  Mr.  Palgrave,  an  excellent 


1 8  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

critic,  on  the  "  Scientific  Study  of  Poetry,"  and  it 
was  addressed  to  the  members  of  a  Workingmen  s 
College.  Was  there  ever  a  more  incongruous  com- 
bination of  ideas,  some  people  would  say,  than  this 
of  Science,  Study,  Poetry,  and  Workingmen  ?  And 
yet  I  venture  to  say  that  unless  we  approach  the 
subject  of  Poetry  in  just  that  spirit,  viewing  it  first 
as  a  serious  study,  next  as  a  study  involving  prin- 
ciples quite  as  much  as  Chemistry  or  any  other  of 
those  branches  of  the  investigation  of  the  laws  of 
matter  to  which,  by  a  strange  perversity  of  lan- 
guage, the  term  Science  is  getting  to  be  exclusively 
confined  ;  and,  again,  if  we  do  not  believe  that  the 
subject  of  Poetry  is  one  pre-eminently  fitted  to  be 
a  theme  for  a  lecture  to  workingmen,  —  in  other 
words,  if  we  do  not  believe  that  Poetry  addresses 
itself  not  merely  to  the  so-called  "  cultured  classes," 
who  are  so  ready  to  believe  that  they  possess  a 
monopoly  of  wisdom,  but  to  man  as  man,  we  shall 
never  know  any  thing  at  all  about  it,  —  we  shall 
remain  in  the  intellectual  condition  of  the  blue- 
and-gold  young  lady,  with  her  poetry  on  her  centre- 
table,  but  not  in  her  soul. 

I  have  no  thought  of  attempting  here  a  definition 
of  Poetry,  though  I  should  like  to  come  and  give 
you  a  lecture  on  the  art  of  reading  it.  Whether 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  19 

we  call  it,  with  Aristotle,  imitation ;  whether  we 
say  more  worthily,  with  Lord  Bacon,  "  that  it  was 
ever  thought  to  have  some  participation  of  divine- 
ness,  because  it  doth  raise  and  erect  the  mind  by 
submitting  the  shows  of  things  to  the  desires  of 
the  mind  ;  whereas,  reason  doth  buckle  and  bow 
the  mind  unto  the  nature  of  things  ; "  *  whether,  in 
more  modern  times,  we  define  it,  with  Shelley,  as 
"  the  best  and  happiest  thoughts  of  the  best  and 
happiest  minds  ;  "  or  say,  with  Matthew  Arnold,  that 
"poetry  is  simply  the  most  beautiful,  impressive, 
and  widely  effective  mode  of  saying  things  ;  "  and, 
again,  that  "  it  is  to  the  poetical  literature  of  an  age 
that  we  must  in  general  look  for  the  most  perfect 
and  most  adequate  interpretation  of  that  age ; "  or 
whether  we  say,  with  the  greatest  poet  of  the  last 
generation,  that  "  poetry  is  the  breath  and  finer 
spirit  of  all  knowledge,  the  impassioned  expression 
which  is  in  the  countenance  of  all  science,"  f  —  all 
I  am  concerned  to  say  here  is,  that  Poetry  is  that 
branch  of  the  Literature  of  Power  pre-eminently 
worthy  of  study,  and  that  without  study  we  shall 
know  but  little  about  it. 

Now  suppose,  to  revert  to  my  first  position,  that 

*  Advancement  of  Learning,  B.  n.  4.  2. 
t  Wordsworth's  Critical  Preface. 


20  THE  RIGHT   USE    OF  BOOKS. 

our  children  were  really  taught  to  read  Poetry  in 
school ;  —  I  am  as  sure  that  it  could  be  done  as  I  am 
that  it  is  not  done  now  ;  —  suppose  that  the  tyranny 
of  Gradgrind,  with  his  clatter  of  grammar-books 
and  spelling-books  and  cyphering-books,  most  of 
them  useless,  were  somewhat  abated,  and  feeling 
and  imagination  as  well  as  bare  intellect  were 
appealed  to,  and  not  only  appealed  to  but  trained 
and  developed  and  directed,  —  do  you  think  there 
would  be  such  a  rush  at  the  library  for  the  Oliver 
Optics,  and  the  Mrs.  Southworths,  and,  worse  still, 
for  the  Miss  Braddons  of  the  day  ?  I  am  sure  the 
twaddle-factories  would  have  to  shut  up,  or  at  least 
work  half-time.  Peter  Parleyism  and  other  goody- 
goodyisms  would  be  less  rampant,  and  the  gin-and- 
water  of  the  circulating  library  would  lose  its 
attractive  flavor. 

"  Do  not  laugh  at  him,"  said  an  accomplished 
lady  once  to  me,  as  we  were  talking  of  an  eccentric 
teacher,  famous  in  the  days  of  our  youth,  —  "  do 
not  laugh  at  him.  He  taught  me  really  to  love 
and  appreciate  English  poetry,  so  that  it  has  been  a 
delight  to  me  all  my  life  through."  That  was  much 
to  say  of  any  teacher ;  that  was  true  education. 

I  just  spoke  of  the  gin-and- water  of  the  circu- 
lating library ;  but  let  me  put  in  a  good  word  for 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  21 

the  circulating  library,  and  for  the  study  of  novels. 
Yes,  the  study  of  novels  ;  for  novel-writing  has  be- 
come, in  these  modern  days,  an  important  branch 
of  art,  and  novels  a  very  real  and  substantial 
department  of  literature.  He  who  either  neglects 
'or  despises  or  fears  novels,  not  only  cuts  himself 
off  from  one  of  the  very  best  sources  of  intellectual 
and  moral  refreshment,  but  ignores  a  branch  of 
literature  from  which  a  wise  reader  can  get  instruc- 
tion as  well  as  entertainment.  I  am  not  a  very 
social  man,  and  some  of  my  best  friends  are  in 
novels.  Don't  you  know  all  Jane  Austen's  people  ? 
Have  you  ever  lain  on  a  couch,  languid  with  illness, 
and  had  some  pleasant  voice  read  "Wives  and 
Daughters  "  to  you  ?  I  say  nothing  of  the  great 
artists,  —  of  Thackeray,  of  George  Eliot ;  but  such 
is  my  love  for  the  dear  old  mother-country,  that 
I  can  greatly  enjoy  Mr.  Trollope's  best  stories,  and 
even  read  his  worst,  for  the  sake  of  the  glimpses  of 
English  life  they  give  me.  I  can  even  find  an 
hour's  amusement  in  the  absurdities  of  that  extraor- 
dinary mountebank  whose  remarkable  fortune  it 
now  is  for  the  moment  to  misgovern  England. 

You  know  what  Talleyrand  said  to  the  young 
man  who  could  not  play  whist :  "Young  man,  what 
an  unhappy  old  age  you  are  laying  up  for  yourself  !  " 


22  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

And  so,  of  him  who  has  not  learned  how  to  read 
novels,  it  may  be  said,  What  a  source  of  refreshing 
and  improving  and  innocent  amusement  he  has 
failed  to  avail  himself  of  ! 

You  say  that  no  department  of  literature  con- 
tains so  much  mischievous  rubbish.  It  is  very  true, 
and  the  only  remedy  is  such  a  training  of  the  popu- 
lar taste  as  would  make  such  rubbish  intolerable ; 
and  I  know  of  no  more  hopeless  feature  in  the  rather 
hopeless-looking  subject  of  popular  education,  than 
its  failure  to  train  the  imagination,  the  greatest  of 
all  educational  forces.  Is  it  owing  to  the  remains 
in  us,  here  in  New  England,  of  that  old  Puritanism 
which  hated  every  thing  beautiful  because  it  could 
only  associate  it  with  that  license  and  lawlessness 
against  which  it  was  the  grim  and  unlovely  protest  ? 
Let  us  hold  the  virtues  of  our  Puritan  Fathers  in 
all  honor,  for  they  were  the  salvation  of  the  nation  ; 
but  let  us  discriminate.  These  same  Puritan  Fa- 
thers of  ours  were  stone-blind  to  much  that  consti- 
tutes the  very  essence  of  all  true  education. 

Many  good  people  have  Puritanic  objections  to 
poetry,  and  still  more  to  novel-reading,  because  of 
its  abuses  ;  and  certainly  the  intemperate  novel- 
reader  is  little,  if  any,  better  than  the  intemperate 
dram-drinker.  But  there  is  another  class  of  ob- 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  23 

jectors  whom  the  defender  of  imaginative  literature 
has  to  meet,  and  that  is  the  Gradgrinds  before- 
mentioned,  the  so-called  practical  men.  "  Poetry  ? 
Imagination  ? "  they  say.  "  What  have  they  to  do 
with  the  realities  of  life?"  —  meaning  corn,  cotton, 
lard,  iron,  and  other  solid  things.  "  Do  you  think  a 
young  man  who  goes  mooning  about  in  the  woods, 
and  can't  for  the  life  of  him  tell  whether  the  tim- 
ber is  fit  to  cut,  or  can  go  right  by  a  good  water- 
privilege  and  never  see  it,  is  going  to  succeed  in 
life  ? "  Well,  Mr.  Goschen  is  a  practical  man.  Mr. 
Goschen  is  a  London  banker,  who  has  succeeded  in 
life.  He  was  a  member  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  Cabinet. 
He  is  an  author ;  not  of  poems,  but  of  a  valuable 
work  on  Foreign  Exchanges — not  a  poetical 
subject.  He  is  certainly  a  good  authority  for  our 
practical  men.  And  this  is  what  he  has  just  been 
saying  in  a  public  address  in  that  most  practical 
and  dirty  of  cities,  Liverpool.  "  Mr.  Goschen  gave 
a  powerful  address,"  says  the  Liverpool  newspaper, 
"  on  the  cultivation  of  the  imagination  as  essential 
to  the  highest  success  in  politics,  in  learning,  and 
in  the  commercial  business  of  life.  The  cultivation 
of  the  imagination  would  no  more  enfeeble  men's 
minds  than  a  journey  to  a  fine  scene  or  a  breezy 
shore  would  enfeeble  their  bodies.  He  preferred 


24  THE  RIGHT  USE  OF  BOOKS. 

'  Alice  in  Wonderland '  for  children  to  any  amount 
of  verbal  photographs  of  good  little  Tommies. 
Imagination  was  needful  for  business ;  and  he 
gave  as  an  illustration  his  own  father.  '  Let  me 
give  you,'  he  says,  l  another  instance  on  this 
point,  and  you  will  forgive  me  if  it  is  somewhat 
of  a  personal  character;  but  it  may  come  home 
to  some  of  the  young  men  here  more  forcibly 
than  the  most  eloquent  generalization.  My  own 
father  came  over  to  England  as  a  very  young  man, 
with  one  friend  as  young  as  himself,  and  with  very 
little  more  money  in  his  pocket  than  a  great  many 
of  the  students  here,  I  dare  say,  possess  ;  and  he 
has  told  me,  half  in  joke  and  half  in  earnest,  that 
he  was  obliged  to  found  a  firm  because  he  wrote 
such  a  bad  hand  that  no  one  would  take  him  for  a 
clerk.  But  he  was  steeped  to  the  lips  in  intel- 
lectual culture.  In  his  father's  house,  as  a  boy,  he 
had  met  all  the  great  literary  men  of  the  best  period 
of  German  literature.  He  had  heard  Schiller  read 
his  own  plays.  He  had  listened  to  the  conversation 
of  great  thinkers  and  great  poets.  He  was  a  good 
historian,  an  acute  critic,  well  versed  in  literature, 
and  a  very  good  musician  to  boot.  But  did  this 
stand  in  his  way  as  a  young  man  coming  over  to 
London  with  a  view  to  found  a  business  ?  Has  it 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  2$ 

stood  in  his  way  of  founding  a  firm  of  which  I,  as 
his  son,  am  very  proud  ?  It  did  not  stand  in  his 
way.  On  the  contrary,  it  aided  his  success  ;  and 
with  this  before  me  I  am  able  to  speak  with  affec- 
tionate conviction  of  the  fact  that  culture  will  not 
interfere  with  the  due  discharge  of  the  duties  of 
business  men  in  any  sphere  of  business  life.' "  * 

Do  not,  I  beg  you,  spoil  a  good  handwriting,  if 
you  possess  that  useful  accomplishment,  in  hopes 
of  thereby  emulating  the  success  of  the  elder  Mr. 
Goschen.  I  don't  believe  that  a  bad  handwriting 
leads  to  certain  success  in  Lombard  Street ;  neither 
do  I  believe  that  an  untrained  imagination  leads  to 
success  there  or  anywhere  else.  Observe  that  the 
elder  Mr.  Goschen's  was  a  real,  not  a  sham  educa- 
tion. We  may  not  have  the  fortune  to  hear  great 
authors  read  their  own  poems ;  but  we  may  read, 
without  the  labor  of  acquiring  a  foreign  tongue,  the 
poems  and  dramas,  the  works  of  genius  of  all  kinds, 
of  a  literature  second  to  none  in  richness  and 
variety  to  any  that  the  world  ever  saw.  When  shall 
we  learn  to  be  as  wise  as  the  Germans,  and  make 
use  of  it  as  fully  as  we  might  as  an  instrument  of 
popular  culture  ?  f 

*  The  Culture  of  the  Imagination,  an  address  delivered  by  the 
Rt.  Hon.  George  J.  Goschen,  M.  P.,  at  the  Liverpool  Institute. 
London.  Efnngham  Wilson.  1878. 

t  "  German  schools  have  a  good  habit,"  says  Matthew  Arnold, 


26  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

But  Mr.  Goschen  goes  much  farther,  and  is  much 
more  precise  and  practical  in  his  view,  than  those 
who  in  general  terms  admit  the  indirect  value  of 
general  culture  in  the  practical  business  of  life. 
He  claims  that  the  possession  of  imaginative  power 
is  directly  needful  to  success  in  all  the  most  practi- 
cal and  prosaic  of  business  affairs,  and  indispensa- 
ble to  the  formation  of  a  sound  judgment  in  politics. 
Commending  to  his  hearers  the  study  of  history 
as  the  study  of  all  others  best  suited  to  cultivate  that 
masculine  power  of  conceiving  other  circumstances 
than  those  which  immediately  surround  us,  which  is 
so  necessary  to  the  politician  and  to  the  man  of  large 
affairs,  he  says,  "  I  am  often  frightened  when,  upon 
some  great  question,  I  hear  a  man  say,  '  I  am  going 
to  take  a  very  business-like  view  of  this  question/  It 
is  almost  as  bad  as  when  a  man,  upon  some  question 
of  propriety,  says  he  is'  going  to  look  at  it  as  a  man 
of  the  world.  I  then  always  suspect  the  judgment 
he  is  going  to  give.  When  a  man  says, '  I  am  going 
to  look  at  a  great  question  as  a  business  man/  it  is 
ten  to  one  he  means,  '  I  am  not  going  to  be  gulled 
by  any  of  your  grand  generalizations.  I  am  not 
going  to  be  misled  by  historical  parallels,  or  se- 

"  of  reading  and  commenting  on  German  poetry  as  we  read  and 
comment  on  Homer  and  Virgil,  but  do  not  read  and  comment  on 
Chaucer  and  Shakspeare." 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  2/ 

duced  by  any  rhetorical  phrases.  I  do  not  wish  to 
be  told  what  foreign  nations  are  thinking  of  or  are 
likely  to  do.  I  wish  to  judge  of  this  as  a  sensible 
man  of  business.  I  know  the  effect  such  and  such 
a  line  of  policy  will  have  on  trade  and  on  the  funds, 
and  that  is  enough  for  me.'  Now,  I  have  some- 
times hoped  that  I  might  have  claimed  myself  to 
be  a  business  man,  or  a  business-like  man,  and 
most  of  you  will  consider  yourselves  the  same  ;  and 
I  say  that  it  is  prostituting  the  name  of  '  business- 
like '  to  confound  it,  as  is  often  done,  with  a  narrow- 
minded  view  of  questions.  That  is  not  business-like 
at  all :  it  is  very  un-business-like.  Call  it  by  what- 
ever name  you  will,  whether  narrow-mindedness  or 
not,  I  consider  that  to  judge  from  hand  to  mouth 
of  all  great  questions  is  a  very  dangerous  tendency, 
—  a  tendency  which  is  fostered  by  ignorance  of 
the  great  principles  of  human  action,  and  of  the 
former  teaching  of  the  history  of  the  world.  .  .  . 
The  study  of  history  will  correct  these  tendencies, 
and  will  mitigate  the  influence  of  any  narrow- 
minded  judgment  of  passing  events." 

Again  he  says  :  "  I  began  with  the  nursery,  and 
I  am  afraid  I  have  launched  you  in  the  end  into  a 
very  wide  field  indeed.  I  might  have  followed  up 
my  argument  by  showing  the  necessity,  even  for 


28  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

many  serious  domestic  questions,  of  cultivating  the 
faculty  to  which  I  have  alluded.  I  might  almost 
venture  to  say  that  a  House  of  Commons  without 
imagination  would  to  my  mind  be  a  bad  House  of 
Commons  and  a  dangerous  House  of  Commons. 
A  church  without  imagination  would  be  a  church 
without  life,  and  without  the  power  of  retaining  its 
hold  upon  its  flock.  Imagination,  in  the  sense 
which  I  have  described,  is  necessary  everywhere." 

Mr.  Goschen  expatiates  eloquently  on  the  value  of 
History  as  a  study  for  the  young  business  men  who 
heard  him.  Do  not  think  that  it  is  because  I  am 
a  teacher  of  History  myself  that  I  echo  his  recom- 
mendation to  a  similar  audience.  In  my  own  seri- 
ous judgment,  no  study  is  half  so  valuable  to  young 
men  engaged  in  the  active  pursuits  of  life  as  a  real 
study  of  History,  and  all  the  preparatory  and  col- 
lateral work  which  a  real  study  of  History  im- 
plies. I  say  a  real  study  of  History ;  for  I  do  not 
mean  by  it  that  petty  memorizing  of  miserable 
compendiums,  the  "  moths  of  History,"  *  as  Bacon 
long  ago  called  them,  which  goes  on  in  schools ; 

*  "As  for  the  corruptions  and  moths  of  history,  which  are 
Epitomes,  the  use  of  them  deserveth  to  be  banished,  as  all  men  of 
sound  judgment  ha«ve  confessed :  as  those  that  have  fretted  and 
corroded  the  sound  bodies  of  many  excellent  histories,  and 
wrought  them  into  base  and  unprofitable  dregs." — Advancement 
of  Learning,  B.  II.  2,  3. 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  29 

nor  do  I  mean,  on  the  other  hand,  that  pottering 
over  the  mere  gossip  of  the  past,  that  perusal  of 
volume  upon  volume  of  "  memoirs  of  the  unmemor- 
able,"  which  passes  for  History  with  antiquarians ; 
as  if  worthless  facts  were  any  the  less  burdens  to 
the  memory  because  they  happened  five  hundred 
years  ago,  or  as  if  unsavory  stories  out  of  the  past 
could  be  deodorized  by  time  so  as  to  be  any  less 
unsavory  now.  By  the  study  of  History  I  mean 
that  robust  and  manly  grappling  with  the  real 
problems  of  the  Past  which  will  make  you  more 
thoughtful,  more  useful,  more  far-seeing  and  wide- 
seeing  men  in  the  Present.  And  let  no  one  think 
that  History  studied  in  this  fashion  is  work  for  idle 
or  languid  hours.  History  is  the  record  of  the  life 
of  the  past.  It  shows  how  the  men  of  the  past 
solved  the  ethical,  religious,  social,  economical,  po- 
litical problems  of  their  day  and  generation.  The 
purpose  of  a  wise  man's  studies  is  to  learn  how 
to  solve  his  own  life-problem.  Placed  in  the  flow- 
ing stream  of  time,  which  will  not  stop  at  his  bid- 
ding, which  whirls  him  away  if  he  does  not  strike 
boldly  out  and  learn  the  nature  of  the  medium  in 
which  he  is  floating  and  the  currents  that  bear  him 
on,  it  must  be,  unless  the  world  is  all  haphazard, 
that  the  wisest  guidance  is  to  be  found  in  the 


30  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

study  of  the  records  of  those  who  have  gone  before 
him.  Here  is  the  story  of  past  failures  and  of  past 
success.  It  is  on  the  past  we  must  build  ;  it  is  out 
of  the  past  that  the  present  must  come.  I  believe 
it  is  by  the  study  of  the  records  of  the  past  that  the 
young  student  can  gather  that  concrete  experience 
which  is  the  necessary  foundation  for  all  profitable 
abstract  thinking.  If  there  is  any  thing  I  feel  dis- 
posed to  caution  you  against  it  is  a  premature  study 
of  metaphysics,  —  that  vague  beating  of  the  air  in 
which  so  many  youthful  minds  weary  themselves 
in  vain.  Philosophy  will  come,  but  let  it  be  the 
ripe  fruit  of  experience  based  on  the  actual  facts 
of  life.  Do  not  lose  yourselves  prematurely  in  the 
cobweb  mazes  of  the  metaphysicians.  Accumulate 
experience,  and  keep  your  feet  firm  on  the  ground 
of  fact,  and  enlarge  the  horizon  of  real  life  by 
lifting  the  curtain  which  hides  from  us  the  life  of 
the  long  procession  of  those  who  have  gone  before 
us, —  that  picturesque  procession,  by  the  side  of 
whose  story  the  best  fiction  of  the  romancer  grows 
pale  and  uninteresting. 

But  do  not  suppose  you  can  put  any  life  into  the 
teaching  of  the  past,  unless  you  can  learn  to  see  the 
History  that  is  a-making  all  round  you.  He  who 
has  not  learned  to  read  his  daily  newspaper  will 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  31 

hardly  read  Gibbon  and  Grote  to  any  purpose ;  he 
who  cannot  see  History  in  the  streets  of  Boston 
will  trouble  himself  to  no  purpose  with  books  about 
Rome  or  Pompeii. 

But,  alas  !  who  is  taught  History  ?  In  my  young 
days,  —  and  I  fear  matters  are  not  much  mended, 
—  as  Isaac  Taylor  says,  some  rattling  dry  bones, 
some,  grinning  skeleton  of  Chronology,  was  hung 
up  before  us,  and  we  were  told,  "There,  my  young 
friends,  there  is  the  noble  and  beautiful  study  of 
History:  fall  in  love  and  become  passionately  at- 
tached to  that."  But  Nature  taught  us  better.  Some- 
how, we  did  not  clasp  the  dull  compendiums  to  our 
bosoms,  and  swear  they  should  be  our  daily  compan- 
ions for  the  rest  of  our  lives.  I  am  afraid  the  dull 
compendiums  were  wrathfully  swept  into  the  low- 
est cupboard  when  the  day  of  school  emancipation 
came;  and  the  misfortune  is  that  the  pupil  thus 
miseducated  fancies  he  has  no  taste  for  History. 
He  might  as  well  say  he  has  no  taste  for  Life,  no 
taste  for  Thought ;  and  indeed  it  is  more  than  prob- 
able that  school  —  that  realm  of  unreason  —  has 
done  all  it  could  to  make  that  true.  When  better 
days  shall  dawn  on  us,  I  believe  that  a  real  study 
of  History  and  all  the  kindred  and  collateral  studies 
which  it  implies  will  be  found  near  the  very  heart  of 


32  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

our  system  of  school  study.  And  if  I  say  no  more 
about  it  here,  it  is  because  I  hope  you  will  give  me 
the  opportunity  to  make  it  my  special  subject  on 
some  future  occasion. 

But  I  must  not  dwell  so  long  on  one  branch  of 
my  subject.  What  shall  I  say  of  the  Literature  of 
Knowledge  ?  I  have  a  few  thoughts  to  suggest. 
I  think  that,  in  view  of  the  headlong  speed  with 
which  mere  knowledge  is  now  pursued  all  round 
us,  it  begins  to  be  needful  to  advocate  the  cultiva- 
tion of  a  little  of  the  spirit  of  contented  ignorance. 
Berzelius,  I  .think  it  was,  who  said  that  he  was  the 
last  general  chemist.  The  single  science  of  Chem- 
istry had  grown  into  such  vast  proportions  that  no 
one  man  could  ever  again  attempt  in  a  single  life- 
time to  traverse  the  whole  field  of  it.  And  if  this 
is  true  of  a  single  branch,  what  shall  we  say  of  this 
vast  new  intellectual  world  of  modern  Physical  Sci- 
ence ?  Sitting  in  my  study  in  a  Scientific  School, 
with  my  books  of  Literature  and  History  about  me, 
I  look  with  some  awe  and  wonder  at  what  goes  on 
in  the  laboratories  and  lecture-rooms  of  my  col- 
leagues, of  the  greater  part  of  which  I  do  not  un- 
derstand one  single  word.  But  it  is  a  contented 
wonder  and  a  happy  ignorance.  Have  not  I  my 
greater  world  of  man's  thoughts  and  man's  doings, 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  33 

—  a  field  itself  far  wider  than  I  can  cultivate  ?  I 
will  not  be  an  Alexander  to  cry  for  new  worlds  to 
conquer. 

But  I  have  one  practical  remark  to  make.  Did 
you  ever  happen  to  see,  in  shrewd,  old,  hard-headed 
Bishop  Whately's  annotations  on  Lord  Bacon's 
Essays,  a  good  passage  about  what  is  and  what  is 
not  superficiality  ?  It  is  in  the  sentence  in  Bacon's 
Essay  on  Studies,  "  Crafty  men  contemn  studies." 
"  This  contempt,"  says  the  bishop,  "  whether  of 
crafty  men  or  narrow-minded  men,  finds  its  expres- 
sion in  the  word  '  smattering ; '  and  the  couplet  is 
become  almost  a  proverb,  — 

'  A  little  learning  is  a  dangerous  thing : 
Drink  deep,  or  taste  not  the  Pierian  spring.' 

But  the  poet's  remedies  for  the  dangers  of  a  little 
learning  are  both  of  them  impossible.  No  one  can 
1  drink  deep '  enough  to  be  in  truth  any  thing  more 
than  superficial ;  and  every  human  being  that  is 
not  a  downright  idiot  must  taste"  And  the  bishop, 
in  his  downright  way,  goes  on  to  give  practical 
illustrations  of  the  usefulness  of  a  little  knowledge, 
and  proceeds :  "  What,  then,  is  the  smattering, 
the  imperfect  and  superficial  knowledge  that  does 
deserve  contempt  ?  A  slight  and  superficial 
knowledge  is  justly  condemned  when  it  is  put 

3 


34  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

in  the  place  of  more  full  and  exact  knowledge. 
Such  an  acquaintance  with  chemistry  and  anatomy, 
for  instance,  as  would  be  creditable  and  not  useless 
to  a  lawyer,  would  be  contemptible  for  a  physician  ; 
and  such  an  acquaintance  with  law  as  would  be 
desirable  for  him,  would  be  a  most  discreditable 
smattering  for  a  lawyer."  * 

The  bishop's  remarks  amount  in  substance  to 
this,  that  on  the  great  majority  of  subjects  an  ordi- 
nary man's  knowledge  must  be  limited  to  a  very 
general  view ;  and  that  a  general  view  is  not  a  su- 
perficial view,  provided  it  is  an  accurate  general 
view,  and  is  not  taken  for  more  than  it  is  worth  ; 
while  it  is  truly  superficial  to  be  ever  so  well 
acquainted  with  all  the  minutest  details  of  some 
corner  of  a  great  subject,  and  be  at  the  same  time 
utterly  incapable  of  taking  a  correct  view  of  it  as  a 
whole.  We  justly  admire  the  sketches  of  great 
artists,  for  they  show  the  same  sweep  and  power  of 
design  as  their  finished  paintings.  Should  we 
admire  some  little  corner  of  a  great  canvas,  fin- 
ished with  minute  and  painful  pre-Raphaelite  dili- 
gence, while  all  the  rest  was  left  a  blank  ?  We 
have  no  opportunity  to  know,  because  no  artist 
works  so. 

*  Whately's  Bacon's  Essays,  p.  446,  Am.  Ed. 


THE  RIGHT  USE  OF  BOOKS.  35 

Now,  I  have  found  fault  with  the  teaching  of  our 
elementary  schools  as  too  often  degenerating  into  a 
dead,  dry,  empty  clatter.  I  find  fault  with  the  teach- 
ing of  what  we  are  pleased  to  call  our  high  schools  on 
an  opposite  ground,  because  it  attempts  so  much  that 
it  becomes  a  thing  of  shreds  and  patches.  Only  look 
at  the  course  of  study  laid  down  in  them  !  The  boys 
escape  into  active  life,  and  get  there  a  real  educa- 
tion. It  is  not  that  the  parents  grudge  the  time, 
that  they  do  not  keep  them  at  school  longer :  it  is 
from  a  true  instinct,  which  tells  them  that  any  real 
work  is  a  better  education  than  more  of  such 
schooling.  The  burthen  of  this  omniscience  falls 
on  the  girls,  who,  having  nothing  else  to  do,  are 
kept  at  school  longer  ;  and  really,  if  they  did  but 
take  in  all  they  are  supposed  to  be  taught,  they 
might  well  go  forth,  at  about  the  age  of  eighteen, 
as  missionaries  of  knowledge  and  instructors  of  the 
nation.  But,  alas !  it  is  but  the  bishop's  true 
smattering,  —  that  smattering  that  does  deserve 
contempt.  It  runs  off  them  as  water  runs  off  a 
duck's  back  ;  and  in  a  very  few  years,  or  months, 
these  young  persons  who  have  "  gone  through  "  (I 
like  that  phrase)  all  the  "ologies,"  are  found  to  be 
no  wiser  than  their  neighbors.  Of  much  of  the 
teaching  that  goes  on  in  what  we  call  our  high 


36  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

schools,  all  that  can  be  said  is,  that  it  is  laboriously, 
conscientiously,  and  elaborately  bad  ;  because  it 
attempts  so  much,  and  is  so  little  suited  to  the 
wants  or  capacities  of  its  recipients. 

Or,  I  might  illustrate  the  same  point  by  an 
American  classical  education,  which  is  an  education 
ingeniously  arranged  so  as  not  to  accomplish  its 
object,  but  is  held  in  superstitious  and  undeserved 
esteem  for  the  supposed  excellence  of  the  mental 
discipline  it  imparts :  as  though  one  should  be 
offered  a  great  treasure  if  he  would  walk  to  Spring- 
field, and  should  walk  only  as  far  as  Worcester, 
where  indeed  he  found  no  treasure,  but  returned 
contented  (though  with  much  loss  of  time),  and 
congratulating  himself  on  the  admirable  muscular 
exercise  the  excursion  had  given  his  legs.  And  in- 
deed so  valuable  is  exercise  that  he  might  well  be 
contented  even  with  the  treadmill,  if  there  were  not 
so  many  other  directions  in  which  he  could  have 
reached  a  treasure  and  got  his  exercise  too. 

In  this  wide  ocean,  then,  of  modern  knowledge^ 
how  shall  we  save  ourselves  from  being  lost  ?  I 
think  there  is  one  principle  by  which  we  can  be 
guided.  The  popular  notion  of  an  educated  man  is 
that  he  is  a  "  book  in  breeches  ;  "  a  sort  of  reservoir, 
which  you  can  tap  for  miscellaneous  information. 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  37 

A  vulgar  person,  when  he  hears  an  educated  man 
say  he  doesn't  know,  say,  the  date  of  King  Se- 
sostris,  thinks  that  that  man's  education  don't 
amount  to  much.  To  such  an  one,  he  is  the  most 
learned  man  who'  can  answer  the  greatest  number 
of  questions.  Hence  this  epidemic  of  examinations 
which  is  attacking  our  education-system,  and  which 
we  have  caught  from  England,  where,  it  is  to  be 
hoped,  it  has  pretty  nearly  run  its  course,  —  com- 
petitive examinations,  civil-service  examinations, 
examinations  for  women,  and  all  the  rest.  Wise 
old  Dr.  Wiese,  returning  to  England  twenty  years 
after  he  wrote  his  first  book  on  her  schools,  thinks 
England  has  gone  examination-mad ;  and  I  greatly 
fear  that  we  are  catching  the  infection.  Here  is 
his  description  of  the  present  condition  of  Eng- 
land :  "  From  time  to  time,"  he  says,  "  something 
like  an  alarum-bell  sounds  throughout  the  country : 
'  Come  and  be  examined  ! '  And  they  come,  —  boys 
and  girls,  young  and  old,  —  having  crammed  into 
themselves  as  much  knowledge  as  they  could. 
How  they  have  acquired  what  they  know  is  never 
asked,  nor  are  they  shown  what  is  the  best 
method."  * 

"  The  apparent  grandeur  and  vastness  of   this 

*  German  Letters  on  English  Education.     London,  1877. 


38  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

system  of  examination,"  he  says  quietly,  "  accord- 
ing to  which  the  same  set  of  printed  papers  is  dis- 
tributed over  England,  and  sent  all  over  the  world, 
to  Canada,  the  Mauritius,  &c.,  has  nothing  im- 
posing for  us."  No,  it  has  nothing  imposing  for 
Germans,  because  they  know  what  true  education 
means  ;  know  that  an  educated  man  is  not  a  book 
in  breeches,  not  a  dead  reservoir  of  information 
which  you  can  tap;  and  that  an  educated  man  may 
not  know  the  date  of  King  Sesostris,  and,  in  order 
to  be  really  educated,  must  continue  ignorant  of  a 
great  many  far  more  important  things;  —  that,  in 
short,  to  be  educated  is  to  be  something  real,  and 
that  the  first  step  towards  that  intellectual  and 
moral  reality  is  to  prepare  ourselves  by  our  training 
to  be  and  do  in  life  just  what  Nature,  in  the  distri- 
bution of  her  gifts,  has  best  qualified  us  to  be  and 
do ;  and  that  the  heaping  up  of  miscellaneous 
knowledge,  under  the  pressure  of  examinations, 
competitive  or  otherwise,  is  about  the  worst  method 
for  accomplishing  this  object  which  human  per- 
versity has  yet  devised.* 

*  A  witty  professor,  on  being  asked  his  opinion  of  certain  col- 
lege examinations  for  girls,  recently  established,  is  said  to  have 
replied :  "  It  seems  to  me  to  be  very  much  as  though  the  town 
paupers  were  to  come  to  the  overseers  of  the  poor  and  ask  for 
assistance,  and  the  overseers  were  to  say,  '  No,  we  have  nothing 


THE  RIGPIT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  39 

Examinations  have  their  legitimate  place  and  in- 
dispensable function  in  education.  When  teacher 
and  pupil  have  faithfully  done  their  respective  parts, 
they  may  well  sit  down  together  and  see  how  far 
they  have  successfully  mastered  the  subjects  in 
hand.  Examinations  are  a  needful  supplement, — 
they  can  never  be  a  substitute  for  teaching ;  and  it 
is  mortifying  to  see  that,  just  when  the  enormous 
evils  of  too  much  dependence  on  them  are  being 
exposed  by  the  very  ablest  of  scholars  and  teachers 
in  the  mother-country,  we  should  be  threatened  in 
this  with  a  repetition  of  the  mistaken  policy. 
And  we  should  especially  be  on  our  guard  against 
the  introduction  of  that  bane  of  all  true  education, 
the  competitive-examination  system,  —  a  system 
which  substitutes  an  extraneous,  mercenary  mo- 
tive for  a  true  love  of  knowledge,  obliterates  all 
landmarks  by  which  the  student  is  guided  to  a 
knowledge  of  the  limits  of  his  powers  and  the 
nature  of  his  real  intellectual  wants,  and  for  the 
labor  of  learning  substitutes  a  cramming  process, 
which  can  only  be  compared  to  that  of  a  lawyer 
getting  up  some  patent-case,  where,  the  moment  the 
cause  is  won,  the  information  needed  to  win  it  is 

for  you  ;  but  if  you  will  come  again,  this 'day  twelvemonth,  we  will 
audit  your  accounts?  "  It  is  the  teaching  of  the  wise  professors 
which  the  girls  need. 


40  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

swept  out  of  a  mind  on  which  it  never  made  any 
real  impression.* 

I  sadly  fear  that  amidst  all  this  clatter  of  exam- 
inations we  shall  lose  sight  more  and  more  of  the 
only  intellectual  labor  that  really  profits  ;  of  the  — 

"Toil  unsevered  from  tranquillity, — 
The  labor  that  in  still  advance  outgrows 
Far  noisier  schemes,  —  accomplished  in  repose 

Too  great  for  haste,  too  high  for  rivalry." 

What  does  all  this  recent  foolish  outcry  against 
over-educalion,  and  especially  against  the  over- 
education  of  girls,  mean  but  this :  not  that  there  is 
too  much  education,  —  it  will  be  many  generations 
before  there  is  any  danger  of  that,  —  but  that  what 
education  there  is  is  of  so  bad  a  quality.  It  isn't 
too  much  study,  Heaven  knows,  that  our  boys  or 

*  I  do  not  believe  that  this  new  system  of  running  educa- 
tional machinery  by  examination-power,  and  especially  by  com- 
petitive-examination-power, will  ever  succeed  in  producing  any 
real  and  healthy  growth  in  our  school  system,  though  it  may  tem- 
porarily serve  a  useful  purpose  as  an  antidote  to  the  educational 
torpor  of  England.  It  is  the  last  new  nostrum  in  a  department 
of  human  effort  which  is  more  than  all  others  at  the  mercy  of 
nostrum-mongers.  I  have  accumulated  notes  of  a  great  body  of 
testimony  against  it  from  the  best  living  scholars  and  wisest  living 
teachers  ;  but  this  is  not  the  place  to  pursue  the  subject.  It  is 
encouraging  to  find  that  the  accomplished  gentleman  who  now 
holds  the  responsible  office  of  Superintendent  of  Boston  Schools 
is  alive  to  its  dangers.  See  his  recently  published  first  semi- 
annual Report. 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  41 

our  girls  are  in  any  danger  from.  The  real  danger, 
—  and  it  is  a  great  one,  —  comes  from  bad  study 
and  bad  teaching.  "  True  study,"  says  a  wise 
writer  I  fell  in  with  the  other  day,  "  is  eminently  a 
leisurely  process,  the  great  condition  of  success  in 
it  being  deliberation  ;  and  though  it  always  suf- 
ficiently interests  the  student  to  keep  his  faculties 
lively,  it  seldom  excites  him  to  any  dangerous 
degree.  Hence,  I  believe  that  genuine  study  is 
much  less  injurious  to  health  than  is  often  sup- 
posed,—  certainly,  much  less  injurious  than  many 
things  which  are  scarcely  reputed  injurious  at  all 
The  processes  of  genuine  and  well-directed  study 
positively  save  the  brain,  by  their  rational  and 
orderly  sequence,  by  the  safe  advance  from  step  to 
step.  Study  of  this  kind  is  like  a  well-built  stair- 
case, by  which  you  can  climb  to  a  great  height 
with  a  minimum  of  fatigue,  never  lifting  the  body 
more  than  a  few  inches  at  a  time.  But  as  there 
might  be  such  a  thing  as  racing  up  a  staircase,  so, 
when  we  study  against  time,  there  is  a  strain  in 
the  mere  speed,  however  good  may  be  the  system 
that  we  are  following.  There  mav  also  be  a  strain 
on  the  faculties,  in  the  direction  ot  them  towards  a 
kind  of  study  which  is  not  adapted  to  our  natural 
gifts.  If  we  learn  what  Nature  qualified  us  to  learn, 


42  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

and  learn  it  step  by  step,  without  hurry,  we  incur  a 
minimum  of  cerebral  fatigue  and  gain  a  maximum 
of  acquirement.  Study  of  this  kind  gently  stimu- 
lates, and  does  not  fatigue,  unless  prolonged  for  an 
unreasonable  length  of  time.  It  is  positively  favor- 
able to  health,  because  it  is  favorable  to  cheerful- 
ness ;  it  makes  life  pleasanter  and  more  interesting, 
and  so  far  from  being  injurious  to  the  nervous  sys- 
tem, gives  it  tone  and  vigor,  exactly  as  manly  exer- 
cises give  tone  and  vigor  to  the  muscular  system. 
There  can  be  no  doubt  that  men  were  intended  to 
bear  intellectual  labor  without  injury  to  their  health 
[and  women  too],  We  are  constituted  to  think 
and  learn,  as  a  fish  is  constituted  to  swim  or  a 
bird  to  fly.  But  a  man  [or  a  woman]  may  bear 
this  healthy  kind  of  mental  toil  very  easily,  or  may 
even  derive  real  benefit  from  it,  and  yet  be  quite 
unable  to  bear  either  hurry  or  cram."* 

I  have  a  profound  sense  of  the  importance  of 
systematic  mental  training,  and  know  well  what 
provoking  defects  are  sure  to  characterize  what  are 
called  self-educated  men.  It  is  the  instinct  which 
teaches  us  that  any  mental  training,  even  the  very 
worst,  is  better  than  none,  that  leads  us  to  tolerate 
so  long  the  enormous  defects  and  the  entire  un- 

*  London  "  Globe,"  quoted  in  "  Essays  in  Mosaic." 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  43 

suitableness  of  the  old  classical  system  of  educa- 
tion. Better  this,  we  say,  than  no  training.  If 
the  Greek  and  Latin  classics  are  the  only  things 
we  know  how  to  teach, — utterly  unsuited  as  they 
are  to  be  the  staple  of  education  of  our  genera- 
tion, —  in  such  a  way  as  to  be  a  true  mental  disci- 
pline, let  us  continue  to  teach  them  till  we  have 
learned  how  to  make  a  mental  discipline  out  of 
the  teaching  of  subjects  as  really  suited  to  the 
wants  of  our  age  as  the  ancient  classics  were  to 
the  generation  of  the  Renaissance.  That  time  is 
fast  approaching.  Unhappily,  I  fear  it  must  be 
admitted  that  between  the  senility  and  decrepitude 
of  the  old  system,  all  run  to  pedantry  and  word- 
mongering,  and  the  still  inchoate  condition  of  the 
new,  our  education-system  is  just  now  a  realm  of 
chaos  and  confusion,  and  the  young  man  who  has 
missed  what  is  called  a  liberal  education  has  per- 
haps quite  as  much  reason  to»  congratulate  himself 
on  the  evil  of  misguidance  he  has  escaped  as  on 
the  advantages  of  mental  discipline  he  has  been 
deprived  of.*  At  any  rate,  young  men  like  your- 

*  What,  for  instance,  can  be  more  preposterous,  judged  by  any 
rational  or  consistent  theory  of  education,  than  the  present 
entrance  examinations  to  the  oldest  and  most  conspicuous  of  our 
colleges  :  examinations  which  still  compel  all  candidates  alike  to 
waste  their  precious  school-days  over  Greek  and  Latin  grammars, 


44  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

selves,  with  the  intellectual  resources  of  a  great 
modern  city  at  command,  and  with  a  resolute  will 
to  take  advantage  of  them,  need  never  despair  of 
doing  much  for  yourselves  which  colleges  should 
have  done,  but  very  likely  would  not  have  done  for 
you.  You  may  well  take  encouragement  in  reading 
the  long  list  of  men  eminent  in  all  departments  of 
intellectual  activity,  —  the  Watts,  the  Grotes,  the 
Faradays,  —  who  either  received  no  college  training, 
or  have  put  on  record  an  emphatic  condemnation 
of  that  they  did  receive.* 

almost  precisely  in  the  way,  —  perhaps,  if  any  thing,  in  not  so 
rational  or  so  good  a  way,  —  as  their  predecessors  spent  them  in 
times  when  a  classical  was  a  real  education ;  while,  the  moment 
the  candidate  succeeds  in  entering  the  college  gates,  the  modern 
theory  of  adapting  education  to  the  wants  and  capacities  of  the 
pupils  is  even  too  fully  recognized  by  the  "elective  system."  If 
the  elective  system,  with  proper  restrictions,  is  the  only  true  sys- 
tem, as  it  undoubtedly  is,  what  possible  objection  can  there  be  to 
applying  it  in  season  to  save  the  boys'  school-days  from  the  obso- 
lete pedantries  of  classical  grinders  ?  A  real  demand  for  good 
teachers  of  modern  subjects  would  soon  create  a  supply,  and  we 
might  besides  have  some  real  classical  scholars. 

*  See,  for  a  beginning  of  such  researches  as  will  be  the  founda- 
tion at  some,  I  fear  far  distant,  day  of  a  true  inductive  science  of 
education,  the  little  book,  "  English  Men  of  Science,  their  Nature 
and  Nurture  ; "  and  the  more  important  work  of  Alphonse  de 
Candolle,  "  Histoire  des  Sciences  et  des  Savants  depuis  deux 
Siecles."  The  same  investigation  should  be  made  into  the  early 
history  of  men  distinguished  in.  literature  and  in  the  practical 
pursuits  of  life. 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  45 

In  choosing  the  studies  on  which  to  spend  such 
precious  leisure  hours  and  such  reserve  of  mental 
power  as  you  can  command,  I  think  you  may  well 
be  guided  mainly  by  two  considerations  :  first,  will 
such  or  such  a  study  be  helpful  to  you  in  your  trade 
or  profession,  whatever  that  may  be,  —  does  it  fall 
in  with  the  mental  aptitudes  and  habits  of  thought 
which  your  daily  calling  has  produced  ?  or,  secondly, 
have  you  any  natural  love  and  inborn  taste  for  it  ? 

I  am  not  afraid  to  say  that  a  man  may,  if  he 
chooses,  make  his  calling  and  profession,  —  the  very 
means  by  which  he  earns  his  bread, —  into  a  liberal 
education.  But  is  it  not,  perhaps  you  ask,  the 
very  definition  of  a  liberal  education  that  it  should 
not  "  smell  of  the  shop  "  ?  Yes,  it  is  still  the  defi- 
nition of  certain  high-stepping  pedants,  who  have 
not  yet  waked  up  to  the  fact  that  the  mediaeval 
monopoly  of  the  term  "liberal,"  enjoyed  by  certain 
special  callings  and  occupations,  has  quite  ceased  ; 
and  that  in  these  modern  days  there  are  innumerable 
forms  of  education,  all  equally  capable  of  being 
made  liberal.  When  the  merchant,  for  example,  was 
the  despised  Jew,  the  prey  of  every  plundering  rob- 
ber-baron, the  robber-baron  looked  down  upon  the 
Jew,  though  even  then  the  Jew  could  probably  write 
his  name,  and  his  plunderer  could  not.  But  now, 


46  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

when  in  every  civilized  community  a  vast  proportion 
of  its  intellectual  power  is  engrossed  in  the  great 
operations  of  commerce  and  manufactures,  how 
astonishing  it  is  that  any  reasonable  human  being 
should  not  look  upon  them  as  liberal  and  liberalizing 
pursuits !  How  strange  that  a  course  of  training 
should  not  be  organized  for  them,  as  distinctly 
leading  up  to  them  as  the  training  of  what  are 
called,  par  excellence,  the  liberal  professions  !  Why, 
it  is  not  many  generations  since  the  liberal  pro- 
fession of  medicine  grew  out  of  the  practice  of 
barber-surgeons  and  old  women  ;  and  the  best  and 
wisest  physicians  will  be  the  readiest  to  tell  you 
now  that,  with  all  their  science,  they  are  practically 
little  better  than  careful  and  skilled  nurses. 

Let  me  advise  you,  then,  to  make  your  calling 
and  occupation,  whatever  it  may  be,  an  instrument 
of  education.  The  practice  of  the  simplest  handi- 
craft involves  and  may  lead  a  man  straight  to  the 
study  of  the  laws  by  which  the  universe  is  governed  ; 
for  those  laws  are  the  same  laws,  whether  in  a 
globe  or  a  drop  of  water.  The  time  will  surely 
come  when  it  will  hardly  be  credited  that  in  a 
century  which  boasted  itself  of  its  enlightenment, 
and  which  was  distinguished  above  all  others  for 
its  progress  in  physical  science,  a  costly  system  of 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  47 

elementary  education  should  have  existed,  in  which, 
while  much  unintelligible  grammar  was  prematurely 
taught,  physical  science  was  absolutely  neglected. 
Why,  Nature  herself,  if  we  would  heed  her  ways,  is 
for  ever  teaching  the  baby  artisan,  the  baby  me- 
chanic. You  are,  most  of  you,  engaged  in  com- 
mercial pursuits.  See  what  a  wide  field  of  liberal 
study  the  merchant's  calling  might  lead  to.  Would 
it  make  it  any  less  liberal  if  the  merchant  or  the 
manufacturer  should  follow  the  example  of  the 
lawyer  and  the  physician,  and  select  from  the  wide 
field  of  possible  acquisitions  those  which  would  be 
practically  useful  to  him  in  his  calling  ?  I  think  the 
study  of  the  great  currents  of  trade  that  flow  round 
our  globe,  slowly  uniting  and  civilizing  nations,  is 
at  least  as  profitable  a  mental  exercise  as  the  study 
of  the  rise  and  fall  of  dynasties,  or  the  gossip  of 
court  circulars.  The  question  of  Protection  and 
Free  Trade  would  be  settled  for  ever  by  a  single 
generation  of  scientifically  educated  merchants. 
A  manufacturer  would  surely  not  be  a  worse  man 
of  business  for  possessing  a  scientific  knowledge 
of  the  goods  he  makes  or  traffics  in.  Was 
Wedgewood  a  worse  potter  for  possessing  the 
artistic  taste  which  led  him  to  employ  Flaxman  to 
design  his  pitchers  ?  It  was  the  foundation  of  his 
fortune. 


48  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

You  say  that  a  merchant  can  be  a  good  merchant 
without  such  knowledge.  I  don't  doubt  it  ;  but 
will  he  be  a  worse  merchant  with  it  ?  I  assume 
that  in  desiring  to  hear  of  home  study,  you  intimate 
that  you  do  not  want  to  devote  body  and  soul  to 
mere  money-getting  drudgery.  You  want  to  com- 
bine study  with  a  life  of  business  :  well,  make  your 
business  your  study,  not  merely  with  the  view  of 
making  more  money  by  it,  —  though  that  would 
seem  to  be  the  directest  way,  —  but  with  the  view 
of  elevating  your  business  into  a  means  of  culture. 
When  the  merchant  and  the  manufacturer  shall 
prepare  themselves  for  and  pursue  their  calling  in 
that  spirit,  they  will  be  reckoned  members  of  liberal 
professions  ;  just  as  the  barber-surgeon  has  grown 
into  a  Master  of  Arts,  a  Doctor  of  Science,  and  a 
member  of  royal  colleges  of  medicine  and  surgery  ; 
just  as  the  vast  extent  and  complicated  nature  of 
modern  mechanical  works,  demanding  as  they  do 
an  elaborate  scientific  training  on  the  part  of  those 
superintending  them,  have  already  raised  engineer- 
ing to  the  dignity  of  a  liberal  profession. 

One  of  the  greatest  of  England's  living  preachers 
has  thus  described  a  too  common  type  of  merchant: 
"  In  every  society,  and  especially  in  a  country  like 
our  own,  there  are  those  who  derive  their  chief 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  49 

characteristic  from  what  they  have,  who  are  always 
spoken  of  in  terms  of  revenue,  and  of  whom  you 
would  not  be  likely  to  think  much  but  for  the  large 
account  that  stands  on  the  world's  ledger  in  their 
name.  In  themselves,  detached  from  their  favorite 
sphere,  you  would  notice  nothing  wise  or  winning. 
At  home,  possibly  a  dry  and  withered  heart;  among 
associates,  a  selfish  and  mistrustful  talk;  in  the 
council,  a  style  of  low  and  ignoble  sentiment ;  at 
church,  a  formal,  perhaps  an  irreverent  dulness, — 
betray  a  barren  nature,  and  offer  you  only  points  of 
repulsion,  so  far  as  the  humanities  are  concerned. 
And  you  are  amazed  to  think  that  you  are  looking 
on  the  idols  of  the  Exchange.  Their  greatness 
comes  out  in  the  affairs  of  bargain  and  sale,  to 
which  their  faculties  seem  fairly  apprenticed  for 
life.  If  they  speak  of  the  past,  it  is  in  memory  of 
its  losses  and  its  gains  ;  if  of  the  future,  it  is  to  an-" 
ticipate  its  incomings  and  its  investments.  The 
whole  chronology  of  their  life  is  divided  according 
to  the  stages  of  their  fortune ;  their  children  are 
interesting  to  them  principally  as  their  heirs  ;  and 
the  making  of  their  will  fulfils  the  main  conception 
of  being  ready  for  their  death.  And  so  completely 
do  they  paint  the  grand  idea  of  their  life  on  the 
imagination  of  all  who  know  them,  that  when  they 

4 


SO  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

die  the  mammon-image  cannot  be  removed,  and  it 
is  the  fate  of  the  money,  not  of  the  man,  of  which 
we  are  most  apt  to  think.  Having  put  vast  prizes 
in  the  funds,  but  only  unprofitable  blanks  in  the 
admiration  and  the  hearts  of  us,  they  leave  behind 
nothing  but  their  property,  or,  as  it  is  expressively 
termed,  their  'effects' — the  thing  which  they 
caused,  the  main  result  of  their  having  been 
alive."  * 

We  are  all  familiar  with  the  original  of  this  pic- 
ture of  the  uneducated  man  of  wealth  ;  and  it  is  a 
commonplace  of  the  pulpits  —  though  the  great 
preacher  I  have  just  been  quoting  is  far  above  such 
narrow-mindedness  —  that  this  is  the  natural  and 
inevitable  result  upon  the  character,  of  commercial 
pursuits.  But  no  opinion  can  be  more  unjust. 
Commerce  and  manufactures  have  expanded  in 
these  modern  days  into  a  field  for  the  exercise  of 
some  of  the  very  highest  faculties  of  the  human 
mind,  and  demand  its  very  highest  training.  Let 
me  contrast  with  this  a  different  picture. 

Speaking  of  the  late  accomplished  editor  of  the 
London  "  Economist,"  Mr.  Bagehot,  a  man  who 
combined  so  remarkably  a  scientific  knowledge  of 
finance  with  great  literary  accomplishments,  Mr. 

*  James  Martineau's  Endeavors  after  the  Christian  Life,  p.  316. 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  51 

Hutton  says  :  "  Every  one  who  knows  his  writings 
in  the  '  Economist '  knows  how  he  ridiculed  the 
common  impression  that  the  chief  service  of  the 
capitalist  class  —  that  by  which  they  earn  their 
profits  —  is  merely  what  the  late  Mr.  Senior  used 
to  call  '  abstinence  ; '  that  is,  the  practice  of  defer- 
ring their  enjoyment  of  their  savings,  in  order  that 
those  savings  may  multiply  themselves  ;  and  how 
wholly  inadequate  he  thought  it  merely  to  add  that, 
when  capitalists  are  themselves  managers,  they  dis- 
charge the  task  of  '  superintending  labor '  as  well. 
Bagehot  held  that  the  capitalists  of  a  commercial 
country  do  not  merely  the  saving  and  the  work  of 
foremen  in  superintending  labor,  but  all  the  difficult 
intellectual  work  of  commerce  besides  ;  and  are  so 
little  appreciated  as  they  are,  chiefly  because  they 
are  a  dumb  class,  who  are  seldom  equal  to  explain- 
ing to  others  the  complex  processes  by  which  they 
estimate  the  wants  of  the  community  and  conceive 
how  best  to  supply  them.  He  maintained  that 
capitalists  are  the  great  generals  of  commerce  ; 
that  they  plan  its  whole  strategy,  determine  its 
tactics,  direct  its  commissariat,  and  incur  the  danger 
of  great  defeats,  as  well  as  earn,  if  they  do  not  al- 
ways gain,  the  credit  of  great  victories."  * 

*  Fortnightly  Review,  Oct.,  1877,  p.  480. 


52  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

Mr.  Bagehot's  description  of  the  leaders  in  com- 
merce and  manufactures  as  a  dumb  class  is  so  far 
true  that  unhappily  we  still  have  to  look  upon  Mr. 
Bagehot  himself  as  an  unusual  phenomenon  ;  and 
are  still  more  astonished  when  a  London  banker, 
without  university  education,  writes  an  elaborate 
and  admirable  history.  But  is  not  the  wonder 
rather  that  in  these  days  these  should  be  unusual 
phenomena?  And  would  they  continue  so,  if  the 
pursuit  of  commerce  were  looked  upon,  as  it  should 
be,  as  a  liberal  and  liberalizing  profession,  with  its 
own  appropriate  course  of  liberal  professional  train- 
ing. We  express  no  surprise  when  we  find  in  the 
descendant  of  the  feudal  baron  a  cultivated  and  ac- 
complished gentleman,  though  in  all  probability  the 
founder  of  his  family  could  not  write  his  name. 

And  in  truth,  just  as  the  vastness  of  modern 
mechanical  enterprises  has  raised  engineering  into 
a  liberal  profession,  so  the  demands  of  modern 
commerce  are  so  great  that  even  for  the  sake  of 
material  success  alone  these  demands  must  be 
met  by  higher  forms  of  education.  On  this  point, 
Mr.  Matthew  Arnold  has  raised  a  warning  voice  in 
his  recent  valuable  Report  on  the  Higher  Education 
of  Germany. 

"  If  the  English  business  class,"  he  says,  "  can 


THE  RIGHT  USE  OF  BOOKS.  S3 

listen  to  testimonies  that,  in  the  judgment  of  others 
at  any  rate,  its  inferior  education  is  beginning  to 
threaten  it  with  practical  inconvenience,  such  testi- 
monies are  formidably  plentiful.  A  diplomatist  of 
great  experience,  not  an  Englishman,  but  much  at- 
tached to  England,  who,  in  the  course  of  the  acqui- 
sition and  the  construction  of  the  Italian  lines  of 
railroad,  had  been  brought  much  in  contact  with 
young  men  of  business  of  all  nations,  told  me  that 
the  young  Englishman  of  this  class  was  manifestly 
inferior,  both  in  manners  and  instruction,  to  the  cor- 
responding young  men  of  other  countries.  .  .  .  And 
the  Swiss  and  Germans  aver,  if  you  question  them 
as  to  the  benefit  they  have  got  from  the  Realschulen 
and  Polytechnicums,  that  in  every  part  of  the  world 
their  men  of  business,  trained  in  those  schools,  are 
beating  the  English  when  they  meet  on  equal 
terms  as  to  capital ;  and  that  when  English  capital, 
as  so  often  happens,  is  superior,  the  advantage  of 
the  Swiss  or  the  German  in  instruction  tends  more 
and  more  to  balance  this  superiority.  M.  Duruy, 
till  lately  the  French  Minister  of  Public  Instruc- 
tion, confirms  this  averment,  not  as  against  England 
in  especial,  but  generally,  by  saying  that  all  over 
the  Continent  the  young  North  German,  or  the 
young  Swiss  of  Zurich  or  Basle,  is  seizing,  by  rea- 


54  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

son  of  his  better  instruction,  a  confidence  and  a 
command  in  business  which  the  young  men  of  no 
other  nation  can  dispute  with  him."  * 

To  the  same  effect,  Prof.  Goldwin  Smith,  writing 
on  University  Extension,  says:  "The  change  to 
which,  and  the  question  arising  out  of  it,  we  wish 
here  emphatically  to  call  attention,  is  the  increased 
demand  for  university  culture  produced  of  late  by 
the  immense  development  of  the  wealthy  class, 
particularly  in  the  great  centres  of  manufacture 
and  trade.  ...  It  is  necessary  that  the  chiefs  of 
English  industry  should  have  culture.  It  is  neces- 
sary for  themselves,  if  they  would  truly  and  wor- 
thily enjoy  their  riches.  A  man  of  business  in 
America  being  asked  why,  having  already  amassed 
enormous  wealth  and  having  no  children,  he  still, 
in  the  evening  of  life,  went  on  building  saw-mills, 
answered  :  '  I  have  no  education.  I  can  find  no  pleas- 
ure in  reading,  hardly  any  in  conversation.  I  have 
no  taste  for  any  thing,  no  interest  in  any  subject. 
What  can  I  do  but  build  saw-mills  ? '  Still  more 
necessary  is  it  for  the  nation  that  the  leaders  of  its 
industrial  society,  and  the  arbiters  of  the  questions 
which  it  is  evident  industrial  society  in  the  coming 

*  Arnold's  "Higher  Schools  and  Universities  in  Germany," 
p.  210. 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  55 

years  will  present,  should  possess  the  openness  of 
mind,  the  intellectual  elevation,  and  the  breadth  of 
view  which,  as  a  general  rule,  culture  alone  can 
give."  * 

And,  whether  in  the  college  or  the  scientific 
school,  it  is  very  manifest  that  that  culture  must 
take  on  new  forms,  adapted  to  the  new  circum- 
stances ;  that  a  youthful  training  in  Latin  and 
Greek  grammars  is  no  more  its  proper  instrument 
than  would  be  a  training  in  the  folios  of  the  medi- 
aeval schoolmen.  The  high  promise  of  many  a 
youthful  life  has  been  blasted  through  the  perverse 
efforts  of  pedants  making  it  the  victim  of  their  un- 
suitable training.! 

In  laying  out  the  true  liberal  education  of  the 
merchant,  the  manufacturer,  and  the  man  of  prac- 
tical affairs,  the  natural  and  physical  sciences  afford 
one  wide  and  ever-enlarging  field  of  study  ;  while, 
as  a  good  patriot  and  good  citizen,  he  is  bound  to 
make  himself  acquainted  with  political  science,:}: 

*  Fortnightly  Review,  January,  1878. 

t  It  excites  one's  indignation  to  see  how,  in  the  so-called  High 
Schools  all  over  the  country,  the  education  of  the  great  majority 
of  the  pupils  is  sacrificed  to  the  interests  of  a  mere  handful  of 
youths  who  are  preparing  for  a  college  examination  in  the  Latin 
and  Greek  classics.  I  speak  from  a  large  experience  in  the 
examination  of  the  victims. 

\  The  rapid  and  decisive  success  of  that  new  experiment  in  the 
higher  education,  the  "  Ecole  Libre  des  Sciences  Politiques,"  in 


56  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

political  history,  and  political  economy.  What  is 
it  that  at  this  moment  threatens  an  honest  and  sol- 
vent country  with  the  disgrace  of  repudiation,  but 
the  knavery  of  demagogues  —  of  whom  I  fear 
Massachusetts  has  the  bad  eminence  of  producing 
the  most  impudent  and  worst  —  acting  on  the  dense 
ignorance  of  the  mass  of  the  people,  and  even  of 
their  fellow-legislators  ?  Would  such  a  state  of 
things  have  existed  if  the  occupation  of  the  mer- 
chant, in  all  its  varieties,  were  looked  upon,  as  it 
should  be,  as  a  liberal  profession,  and  prepared  for 
with  professional  zeal  and  accuracy  ? 

Take,  then,  for  your  hobby  whatever  pleases  you 
—  the  more  remote  from  your  daily  calling  the 
better,  because  the  more  refreshing.  Unhappy  is 
the  man  who  cannot  give  himself  rest  and  change 
and  recreation  by  mounting  a  hobby.  Be  it  butter- 
flies or  microscopes  or  Jersey  cattle,  have  a  hobby  ; 
the  best  you  can  afford,  the  one  that  gives  you 
most  amusement.  But  that  is  amusement.  Study 
your  profession,  not  merely  that  you  may  make 
more  money,  —  for  that  would  be  to  be  illiberal,  — 
but  that  you  may  make  your  calling  the  instrument 
for  liberalizing  your  mind.  Do  not  degrade  your 

Paris,  is  one  among  many  evidences  of  the  latent  demand  that 
exists  for  new  and  better  educational  organization  and  machinery. 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  57 

characters  as  men  of  business  by  imitating  that 
most  illiberal  of  all  illiberal  kinds  of  study,  albeit 
carried  on  at  universities,  —  the  cramming  for  com- 
petitive examinations,  the  headlong  race  for  the 
money  prizes  of  college  scholarships  and  fellow- 
ships. 

And  this  will  lead  to  one  further  result :  it  will 
teach  the  much-needed  lesson  of  concentration  ;  the 
lesson  that,  if  we  are  to  accomplish  anything  in 
this  world,  we  must  not  dissipate  our  forces.  It  is 
the  bad  farmer  who  just  scratches  the  surface  of  too 
many  acres  ;  the  good  general  who  fights  it  out  on 
the  same  line.  The  main  reason  for  the  ill  success 
of  our  reading  and  our  education  is  because  -they 
lack  point,  lack  system,  lack  concentration.  So 
that  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  the  time  is  coming 
when  the  very  opposite  view  will  be  taken  of  what 
constitutes  a  liberal  education  from  what  has  here- 
tofore prevailed  ;  and  instead  of  its  being  thought  to 
be  a  vague  and  indefinite  something,  made  up  of 
disconnected  ingredients,  whose  chief  characteristic 
is  that  they  are  as  remote  as  possible  from  the 
duties  and  responsibilities  of  life,  he  will  come 
hereafter  to  be  considered  to  have  the  best  liberal 
education  who,  having  discovered  betimes  what  he 
was  best  fitted  to  do  in  life,  shall  have  prepared 


58  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

himself  in  the  soundest  and  most  perfect  manner 
to  do  that  work  in  the  broadest  and  most 
liberal  spirit.  Then  the  antiquated  superstition 
will  disappear,  that  there  is  a  necessary  antagonism 
between  what  is  practical  and  what  is  liberal. 
Then  the  merchant  will  not  be  —  to  imitate  a 
phrase  of  Mr.  Emerson's  —  a  trader,  but  a  man 
trading ;  the  engineer  will  not  be  an  engineer,  but 
a  man  engineering  ;  the  farmer  not  a  farmer,  but  a 
man  farming.  And  why  a  man  farming,  or  a  man 
trading,  should  be  inferior  in  dignity  to  a  man 
preaching,  or  a  man  healing  the  sick,  or  a  man  plead- 
ing a  cause,  it  passes  my  wisdom  to  discover. 

I  have  no  method  of  study  to  prescribe  to  you. 
There  are  as  many  methods  as  there  are  men. 
The  mind,  if  it  has  any  true  vitality,  is  a  magnet 
which  selects  unerringly  from  the  heap  of  knowl- 
edge those  grains  which  are  in  vital  relation  with 
itself ;  but,  unlike  the  magnet,  every  mind  has  its 
own  specialty  of  attraction.  But  the  metaphor  is 
incomplete :  for  it  must  not  only  attract  particles 
of  knowledge  into  a  heap,  —  it  must  assimilate 
them  into  a  whole  ;  and  though  this  is  done  partly 
in  the  poet's  "  wise  passiveness,"  *  yet  that  wise 

*  "  Nor  less  I  deem  that  there  are  powers 

Which  of  themselves  our  minds  impress  : 
That  we  can  feed  this  mind  of  ours 

In  a  wise  passiveness."  WORDSWORTH. 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  59 

passiveness  is  never  earned  save  by  much  and  wise 
activity.  But  I  say  the  mind  must  have  vitality ; 
and  I  sadly  fear,  nay,  I  am  very  sure,  that  the  true 
vitality  of  many  a  young  mind  is  paralyzed,  not  de- 
veloped, by  our  dead  mechanical  school-training. 

Do  not  imagine  that  you  can  find  study  easy,  or 
that,  as  busy  and  occupied  men,  you  can  do  very 
much  of  it.  It  is  the  easiest  thing  in  the  world  to 
waste  time  over  books.  The  fundamental  error  about 
reading  is  to  suppose  it  easy.  The  tired  man  reads, 
and  is  not  conscious  that  he  is  learning  nothing,  sim- 
ply because  his  mental  force  is  already  exhausted ; 
or  he  throws  down  his  book  in  disgust,  and  calls 
himself  stupid  and  a  dunce,  unconscious  all  the 
while  that  throughout  the  day  he  may  have  been 
exerting  mental  powers  and  mental  activity  which 
the  best  student  might  well  afford  to  envy.  Such 
are  the  contradictory  superstitions  about  books,  — 
on  the  one  hand  that  they  are  mysterious  compli- 
cated machines,  which  it  takes  a  lifetime  to  learn  to 
manage  ;  on  the  other  that  they  are  the  fit  recrea- 
tion for  exhausted  minds.  One  view  is  as  far  from 
truth  as  the  other.  Books  are  tools  of  knowledge, 
like  any  other  tools.  To  be  a  great  scholar  or  a 
great  writer  is  as  difficult  as  to  be  a  great  merchant 
or  a  great  captain,  —  no  more,  no  less.  To  write  a 


60  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

good  book  requires  the  same  investment  of  time 
and  thought  and  patient  labor  as  to  make  money, 
or  build  a  bridge,  or  plead  a  cause  successfully,  — 
no  more,  no  less.  There  have  been  a  few  great 
geniuses  in  the  world  who  have  written  very  great 
books.  So  there  have  been  a  few  great  generals,  a 
few  great  statesmen.  Men  of  genius  in  all  depart- 
ments are  very  rare  ;  the  makers  of  great  fortunes  are 
not  many.  But  the  majority  of  books  are  not  mi- 
raculous performances.  Given  the  requisite  leisure, 
the  requisite  command  of  materials,  a  reasonable 
amount  of  brains,  and  the  rest  is,  as  everywhere  else 
in  human  affairs,  a  matter  of  patient,  persevering 
labor.  And  as  is  the  making  of  books,  so  is  the 
reading  of  them,  —  a  matter  of  time  and  patient 
perseverance. 

I  cannot  close  without  giving  you  one  little  piece 
of  purely  practical  advice.  I  advise  you  all  to  be- 
come what  I  am  myself,  devoted  disciples  of  Captain 
Cuttle,  and  to  bind  on  your  brows  his  admirable 
maxim,  "  When  found,  make  a  note  of."  Witty 
old  Thomas  Fuller  says  :  "  Adventure  not  all  thy 
learning  in  one  bottom,  but  divide  it  between  thy 
memory  and  thy  note-books.  ...  A  commonplace 
book  contains  many  notions  in  garrison,  whence 
an  owner  may  draw  ouj:  an  army  into  the  field 


THE   RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  6 1 

on  competent  warning/'  This  is  one  of  those 
notions  which  I  have  kept  in  the  garrison  of  my 
note-book  for  many  years.  The  great  secret  of 
reading  consists  in  this,  that  it  does  not  matter  so 
much  what  we  read  or  how  we  read  it,  as  what  we 
think  and  how  we  think  it.  Reading  is  only  the 
fuel ;  and,  the  mind  once  on  fire,  any  and  all 
material  will  feed  the  flame,  provided  only  it  have 
any  combustible  matter  in  it.  And  we  cannot  tell 
from  what  quarter  the  next  material  will  come. 
The  thought  we  need,  the  facts  we  are  in  search  of, 
may  make  their  appearance  in  the  corner  of  the 
newspaper,  or  in  some  forgotten  volume  long  ago 
consigned  to  dust  and  oblivion.  Hawthorne,  in 
the  parlor  of  a  country  inn,  on  a  rainy  day,  could 
find  mental  nutriment  in  an  old  directory.  That 
accomplished  philologist,  the  late  Lord  Strangford, 
could  find  ample  amusement  for  an  hour's  delay  at 
a  railway  station  in  tracing  out  the  etymology  of 
the  names  in  Bradshaw.  The  mind  that  is  not 
awake  and  alive  will  find  a  library  a  barren  wil- 
derness. Now,  gather  up  the  scraps  and  fragments 
of  thought  on  whatever  subject  you  may  be 
studying,  —  for  of  course  by  a  note-book.  I  do 
not  mean  a  mere  receptacle  for  odds  and  ends,  a 
literary  dust-bin, — but  acquire  the  habit  of  gath- 


62  THE  RIGHT  USE  OF  BOOKS. 

ering  every  thing  whenever  and  wherever  you 
find  it,  that  belongs  in  your  own  line  or  lines  of 
study,  and  you  will  be  surprised  to  see  how  such 
fragments  will  arrange  themselves  into  an  orderly 
whole  by  the  very  organizing  power  of  your  own 
thinking,  acting  in  a  definite  direction.  This  is  a 
true  process  of  self-education  ;  but  you  see  it  is  no 
mechanical  process  of  mere  aggregation.  It  re- 
quires activity  of  thought,  —  but  without  that  what 
is  any  reading  but  mere  passive  amusement  ?  And 
it  requires  method.  I  have  myself  a  sort  of  literary 
book-keeping.  I  keep  a  day-book,  and  at  my  leisure 
I  post  my  literary  accounts,  bringing  together  in 
proper  groups  the  fruits  of  much  casual  reading. 

But  let  him  who  would  succeed  in  knowing  any 
thing  be  careful  of  one  rule,  —  not  to  meddle 
in  his  studies  with  subjects  that  don't  concern 
him.  He  may  read  for  amusement  what  he 
pleases :  in  his  studies  let  him  keep  himself  to  his 
chosen  line  and  keep  order  among  his  acquisitions, 
if  he  would  have  his  intellectual  wealth  accumulate. 
He  need  not  potter  about  to  find  the  very  best 
thing :  let  him  take  the  best  available.  A  poor 
book  —  a  very  erroneous  book  —  is  sometimes  the 
very  best  provocative  of  thought.  Who  is  better 
for  this  than  Mr.  Buckle,  and  who  is  fuller  of  crude 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  63 

paradoxes  and  undigested  knowledge  ?  Of  him 
unfortunately  that  was  true  which  Bentley  said  of 
Warburton,  that  "there  never  was  a  man  with  so 
great  an  appetite  and  so  bad  a  digestion."  You 
say  Mr.  Buckle  himself  was  a  great  commonplace- 
book  maker.  Yes,  but  he  didn't  half  digest  his 
commonplaces.  Take  them  and  digest  them 
yourself. 

And  I  have  one  more  thing  to  say,  —  that  noth- 
ing can  be  done  in  study  without  a  spirit  of  fear- 
less independence.  He  who  is  not  prepared  to  set 
Truth  above  all  sect  or  party,  or  popular  prejudice 
or  mere  traditional  belief,  will  never  find  her,  and 
may  as  well  abandon  the  search.  And  in  these 
days  of  warring  faiths  and  contradictory  philoso- 
phies, this  is  hard.  But  study  is  not  easy ;  think- 
ing is  not  easy.  Whatever  is  worth  having  in  this 
world  has  got  to  be  paid  for.  Let  me  only  recom- 
mend that  your  independence  be  the  thoughtful 
independence  of  a  modest  man,  not  the  brawling 
aggressive  independence  of  a  fool ;  and  let  me  give 
it  as  my  deepest  conviction,  that  it  is  only  by  the 
exercise  of  such  a  modest  and  manly  independence 
that  we  can  attain  to  that  calmness  of  faith  that 
enables  us  to  bear  the  troubles  of  this  life,  and 
secures  to  us  a  belief  in  a  better  one.  And  you 


64  THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS. 

will  accept  this  advice  perhaps  the  more  readily 
from  one  who  knows  well  the  responsibility  he 
incurs  in  giving  it,  but  who,  in  a  life  which  has  had 
its  full  share  of  disappointments  and  sorrows,  has 
never  repented  of  having  acted  upon  it  himself; 
and  who,  now  that  his  hair  has  grown  gray,  can 
say  in  all  honesty  that,  though  he  knows  much  less 
than  at  your  age  he  thought  he  knew,  yet  believes 
and  hopes  a  great  deal  more ;  and  who  sees  no  bet- 
ter way  for  us,  in  these  days  when  the  foundations  of 
the  great  deep  are  moved,  and  the  old  systems,  but 
not  old  truths,  are  vanishing,  than  to  possess  our 
souls  in  patience,  think  modestly  but  independently 
for  ourselves,  and  seek  unweariedly  for  the  light 
which,  when  sought  for  rightly,  will  never  fail  us. 

And,  studied  in  this  spirit,  (who  can  overestimate 
the  value  of  good  books,  —  those  ships  of  thought, 
as  Bacon  so  finely  calls  them,  voyaging  through  the 
sea  of  time,  and  carrying  their  precious  freight  so 
safely  from  generation  to  generation  ?  Here  are 
the  finest  minds  giving  us  the  best  wisdom  of  pres- 
ent and  all  past  ages ;  here  are  intellects  gifted  far 
beyond  ours,  ready  to  give  us  the  results  of  lifetimes 
of  patient  thought ;  imaginations  open  to  the  beauty 
of  the  universe,  far  beyond  what  it  is  given  us  to 
behold ;  characters  whom  we  can  only  vainly  hope 


THE  RIGHT  USE   OF  BOOKS.  65 

to  imitate,  but  whom  it  is  one  of  the  highest  privi- 
leges of  life  to  know.  Here  they  all  are ;  and  to 
learn  to  know  them  is  the  privilege  of  the  educated 
man.  To  travel  life's  journey  without  knowing 
them  is  to  be  uneducated ;  to  be  taught  to  pretend 
to  know  them,  —  to  know  the  surface  and  shell  of 
them,  without  ever  penetrating  to  the  reality,  — 
that  is  to  be  7/zz.reducated  ;  and  there  is  no  country 
in  the  world  where  so  much  of  that  miseducation 
goes  on  as  our  own.  However  much  or  however 
little  may  be  our  acquaintance  with  books,  let  us 
strive  to  make  it  a  real  acquaintance,  and  we  shall 
find  few  better  companions  than  the  best  of  these 
silent  ones. 


Cambridge :    Press  of  John  Wilson  &  Son. 


14  DAY  USE 

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